Dziga Vertov (1896–1954)

Dziga Vertov was born Denis Abramovich Kaufman in Bialystok, Poland in 1896. In 1917, he began studying neurology in St. Petersburg where he experimented with sound and human perception. It was while studying that he adopted his nom de guerre “Dziga Vertov,” which roughly translates to “spinning top.”

In 1918, Vertov was hired as an assistant for Mikhail Koltsov, head of the Moscow Film Committee’s newsreel section. He counted among his colleagues Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein’s future cameraman, Eduard Tissé. There he was soon promoted to editor of Kinonedelya, the first weekly Soviet newsreel series. Making these newsreels gave Vertov an opportunity to experiment with his bourgeoning interest in montage. It was there that he began assembling clips to achieve a poetic effect designed to pull in the viewer.

He left the newsreel division in 1919 to edit the feature documentary Anniversary of the Revolution (1919). That same year, Vertov, along with his future wife Yelizaveta Svilova and other young filmmakers, formed the Kinoks (from kino-oki or cinema-eyes) group. The Kinoks, Vertov, Svilova and Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman, published several manifestos espousing their theories on the future and purpose of cinema. The Kinoks rejected what they called “staged” cinema, featuring actors, plots, and studio shooting, in favour of the “cinema of fact”—newsreels portraying the real world as “life caught unawares.” Vertov stressed the primacy of the camera (what he called kinoglaz or Kino-Eye) over the human eye. As a machine, the camera can be perfected, and capture the world in its entirety, with its ability to organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective set of pictures.

Around this time, Vertov launched the newsreel series, Kino-Pravda (Cine-Truth) named for the official Soviet newspaper Pravda, and continued developing his montage techniques and theories on cinema as the art form for the masses. He produced 23 newsreels between 1922 and 1925.

While Vertov considered his films to be visual records of Soviet life, his experimentation with strange camera angles, rhythmic montage, split screen effects and superimposition demonstrated a unique poetic vision. It is a vision that raised the suspicion and ire of many party officials, which ultimately hurt his career.

However, Vertov did receive support and acclaim from the European avant-garde. His feature documentary Kino-Eye: Life Caught Unawares(1924) earned him a silver medal and honorary diploma at the World Exhibit in Paris.

In 1926, Vertov made A Sixth Part of the World, a film he assembled from found footage and film shot by eight teams of kinoks captured during their tours of the Soviet Union. Vertov relied heavily on the use of intertitles, which ultimately drew criticism from prominent critics, who accused the director of distorting reality. For this reason, and the fact that Vertov went well over budget, he was expelled from Sovkino after the film’s release. He went on to make The Eleventh Year(1928), a film celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution commissioned by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration.

He followed this film up with what would become his masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). [See: Man with a Movie Camera]

In 1934, Vertov directed Three Songs of Lenin(1934), commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death, the production was met with problems, requiring extra footage to be added, and a six-month delay in its release. His final film as an independent artist, Lullaby(1937), also faced trouble and was heavily edited without his input.

Despite international acclaim, Vertov was never a favoured in the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1930s, he was no longer receiving serious work, and was relegated to directing standard industrial newsreels.

Vertov died in 1954, but he continued to influence filmmakers years after his death. In 1960, French documentary directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin turned to Vertov’s writings and practice when developing their cinéma vérité-style of filmmaking.Sources